The Best Meltdown Money Can Buy
Democrats and Republicans are tripping all over each another to blame the other side for the financial crisis we're in. Fact is, they're both dead right.
A new report called Sold Out: How Wall Street and Washington Betrayed America (3MB PDF) "chronicles in gruesome detail" 12 areas where deregulation led to today's economic meltdown, beginning with the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 (sorry Clinton fans, but he is a shameless faux Democrat).
Over the last 10 years, protections that had been built into the financial system over decades were systematically dismantled. How could this happen?
Wall Street didn’t obtain these regulatory abeyances based on the force of its arguments. At every step, critics warned of the dangers of further deregulation. Their evidence-based claims could not offset the political and economic muscle of Wall Street.
The report defines "Wall Street" as securities firms, commercial banks, insurance companies, and accounting firms, and its "political and economic muscle" as money. These firms [stunned emphasis mine]:
drowned political candidates in campaign contributions over the past decade, spending more than $1.7 billion in federal elections from 1998-2008...
The industry spent even more — topping $3.4 billion — on officially registered lobbying of federal officials during the same period.
That's a total of $5.1 billion dollars that these firms invested in our federal decisionmakers, both Democrats and Republicans. Considering the decade-long orgy these firms indulged themselves in, and the hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars they're getting in bailout funds now, that's not a bad investment.
The tragic thing is, the looting of our economy could have been avoided by implementing one simple idea — take the effing money out of politics.
